When Jo Cox was murdered, her killer shouted “Britain First” – the name of the political party formed by former BNP members, which has over 1.5m likes on Facebook. The Daily Mail buried the news of his conviction for murdering a sitting MP on page 30, almost as if the Mail thought it was somehow unimportant.
On Monday, a reported stabbing at Forest Hill railway station in London is said to have been preceded by anti-Muslim shouts. Our inability and unwillingness to acknowledge the role of our own culture in creating dangerous environments for minorities is insidious.
Ash Sarkar, a senior editor at Novara, spoke on Twitter after the alleged attack, saying: “These incidents are not a demonstration of violent rightwing politics invading the everyday, but a violent manifestation of the politics *of* the everyday.”
We’ve been worrying about the “normalisation” of far-right rhetoric but people such as the Dutch writer Flavia Dzodan have been patiently pointing out for years that this is normal, and that minorities have been hearing this their whole lives.
The Republican strategist Lee Atwater famously described the strategy of racially coding statements during the Reagan years, but it predates that. The British media respond to immigration with frothing apoplexy, wails of imminent civilisational collapse and the demonisation of some minority group or other as a matter of routine and tradition.
The drip, drip, drip in the background solidifies the message simply as what “everybody knows”
The propagandist press in this country understands well that its job is not the individual news stories but the accumulation of headlines, day in and day out, right in front of people when they go to buy groceries and petrol. Individual pieces can be exposed as lies, but fact-checking is already too late.
When politicians say British people are at the back of the queue, we know who we’re expected to think is at the front of that queue, because the miasma of propaganda has reiterated its answer every day for years.
Many people in this country believe that Muslims are much __more numerous than they really are. You can easily see why people would come to this conclusion. Why would national newspapers and government ministers spend so much time and effort talking about Muslim communities undermining British values if in reality they make up less than 5% of our population?
This is not because the electorate is full of weak-minded “sheeple”. The work of Nobel prizewinner Daniel Kahneman and his partner, Amos Tversky, gives us an insight into why and how the game works.
“Availability” matters. Under uncertainty, people’s judgments weigh recent information rather than compelling argument. This is why propaganda must be wide-reaching to be effective. The aim is not to rationally convince but to plant the message everywhere so that it can be easily recalled.
Over time, the drip-drip-drip in the background solidifies the message into simply “what everybody knows”, especially in the absence of a countervailing narrative.
Triangulation doesn’t work with this. You can’t meet people halfway – they only take your weaselling as proof that “even the liberals” accept the truth that foreigners are dangerous.
The thing about euphemistic language is that it enables people to deny threats have been made. It’s like the racketeer saying: “Nice place you got here. It’d be a shame if anything were to happen to it.” If you point it out, be prepared for screams of fauxtraged pseudo-victimhood.
The trick relies on onlookers deliberately choosing to pretend to be ignorant in order to avoid the stress of dealing with their tantrum. If someone can get away with saying: “I never explicitly said I’d throw a brick through your window,” they get to make the threat then blame their victim for reacting to it.
In reality, such reductionism is as plausible as walking through the aftermath of a school shooting and saying: “Look, some of these individual bullets didn’t hit a person, so you can’t say for certain whether there was intent to harm.” It requires a suspension of critical thought that would be unreasonable in any other context.
The community I live in seems about 70% brown-faced, and the worst thing I can say about it is that most of the dads really seem into the whole socks-and-sandals thing. People’s kids go to school, the same as everyone else, have the same accents as the rest of us, and play on their scooters in the street.
The language used to describe them is dehumanising and vile. They are swarms who overwhelm us, burdens and takers. We use the language of dirt and disease, words tailored to evoke disgust. We defend their aggressors with a credulous literalism, as if expecting professional writers to be aware of subtext is some kind of unreasonable burden. Is the defence really that they can’t be malicious because they are incompetent?
Pointing out racially coded language is not a form of “political correctness”, the cosmopolitan elites telling authentic “real” people how to think. Nor does it somehow cause racism, any __more than the Met Office makes it rain.
The coding of some people as “real” is not only part of the process, but is also only invoked selectively. Joining a union or striking for better pay is something we must have been tricked into by those manipulative unions, but thinking your council house will be taken by immigrants is just the genuine concern of an authentic British patriot.
Racism is real. Propaganda that inflames racist prejudice is also real – and this decade’s target of choice is Muslims. There is no neutral position on this. The propagandist press pretends it doesn’t know what it’s doing. We shouldn’t pretend to believe them.
- This article was amended on 17 December 2016. An earlier version said the stabbing on Monday was at Forest Hill tube station. There is no tube station in that area; the attack was at Forest Hill railway station.